About.
Who writes these guides, and what they will not tell you.
Why First Gear exists
Most people who quit running quit in the first three weeks, and they quit for the same reason: they ran too fast to keep going, decided that running feels terrible, and concluded that runners are a different kind of person. They were right about the first part and wrong about the rest. They were just going too fast.
First Gear fixes the pace problem by taking the decision away from you. It reads your heart rate on your Apple Watch and tells you when to jog and when to walk, so every interval ends before it starts to hurt. You jog in your first session. Most people run a mile in about six weeks.
Who writes the guides
How the guides are written
These pages are about your knees, your heart rate, and your body at whatever age it is. Here is what that means for how they get written.
- Every claim that could change what you do carries a citation. Sources are listed in full at the foot of each guide and repeated in the page structured data, so a machine reading the page can check them too.
- Sources are peer-reviewed research or guidance published by a professional body. Where the evidence is thin or the studies disagree, the guide says so instead of picking the tidier answer.
- Nobody here is a clinician, and no clinician has reviewed these pages. The guides explain what the research found. They do not diagnose anything, and they cannot tell you whether you personally are ready to run. That is a question for your doctor.
- The ceiling on what we claim is the same everywhere on this site: most people run a mile in about six weeks. There is no bigger number anywhere in this copy, because we do not have one.
Who publishes this
First Gear is built and published by Rubber Bands LLC. The app is the product; the company is what signs the terms and the privacy policy.
Questions about anything here, including a correction to a guide, go to support@firstgear.run. Corrections get made.